Although he experimented with LSD, he hated psychedelic music. He dressed in old slouch hats and droopy vintage suits. Robert Crumb is associated with the San Francisco Hippie scene but couldn't have been more separate from it. Director Zwigoff uses old film and testimonial interviews to support the case of Crumb as a special member of a group of San Francisco alternative artists.īut most of Crumb delves into its subject's personal life, which is nothing less than fascinating. Rather than create a Crumb comix empire he invited other artists to share space with him in the early underground comic books. With only a few missteps like Fritz the Cat he has refused to sell out his art. Robert Crumb is neither a pervert nor an opportunist but a genuine artist "doing what he has to do". We see him inking beautiful drawings and dashing off impressive cartoon sketches, an activity that seems to fill his every idle moment.
The two hours of Crumb is barely enough time to cover this remarkable man. When asked if he's ever been criticized for his frankly shocking images of black characters, Crumb replies that the only ones to complain have been white liberals. His work frequently touches on repellent themes. Zap comix teemed with racist and sexually perverse imagery - one Crumb character looked like a walking testicle. Although Crumb was the master of many styles his most iconic work looked something like illustrations from old Segar Popeye comic strips, with themes that dipped straight into the suppressed unconscious: racism, scummy sex, societal taboos, paranoia and the seething rage of the unwashed. A couple of years later in college we discovered Crumb's amazing artwork in Zap comix, which clearly came from a mind completely unrestrained by conventional morality. In 1968 every kid in the country came in contact with Crumb's cover art for Big Brother and the Holding Company's album Cheap Thrills.
It would be harder to imagine a more contentious subject than Robert Crumb, the artist and cartoonist who more or less created the Underground Comix movement with his highly idiosyncratic and frequently pornographic depictions of the seamy side of the American mentality. It required extreme patience from its director Terry Zwigoff, who was close friends with his subject yet clearly had to do a lot of convincing to secure his cooperation. 1995's Crumb involved years of filming and waiting. Barbara Kopple decided to investigate Harlan County, U.S.A. When they started Gimme Shelter the Maysles brothers thought they were making a conventional backstage concert film. Truly transcendent documentary films often seem the result of sheer serendipity, the choice of just the right subject at the perfect time. Produced by Lynn O'Donnell, Terry Zwigoff With Robert Crumb, Aline Crumb, Charles Crumb, Maxon Crumb. 1995 / Color / 1:33 enhanced widescreen / 120 min.
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